As climate change’s effects continue to more directly manifest in the form of increased and more severe weather, home insurance companies in the U.S. have accelerated policies to offload costs to consumers. Nowhere has this trend been more intimately felt than in Black communities, where a racial gap in climate-related economic disadvantage is quickly deepening. Insurers play a key role in this through a process called “bluelining.”
Bluelining speaks to how financial institutions, specifically insurers, inflate consumer costs or eliminate service in areas that are both at elevated risk for major environmental harms and inhabited mostly by minorities. The practice is deeply connected to redlining, whereby lenders refuse to extend credit to individuals who are otherwise eligible, as a discriminatory means of controlling where certain populations live. Like redlining, bluelining deepens segregation, creating a buffer between minority populations and social and economic opportunities.
